Third Week: Triggering, Talks, and Tombs

June 24th, 2016

I am definitely getting a better understanding of my research question, I didn't fully grasp this fact until I was asked to create the elevator speech for this week’s blog assignment. I now think I have a full understanding of the science behind why what I am doing would work to find remotely triggered earthquakes. Since the earth filters out high frequency over time and distance naturally I am looking in areas farther away from the original earthquake to try and find higher frequencies. These high frequencies don't come from the original earthquake but from the area of the seismographs indicating a new earthquake was triggered due to the waves of the first earthquake passing through. So far I have been tasked with looking through each spectrogram that I have created to try and find areas of interest. If I think that I have found a high frequency signal that looks promising I then plot it on SAC and see if the waveform has a clear p, s, and surface wave. Some of the areas I look at end up being noise or some other signal but I have found some stations that look promising. Doing the elevator speech of my topic helped me realize that I had a firmer grasp on my task than I had originally thought. Elevator speeches are useful for understanding the big picture of your research and being able to quickly explain the basics of your task. Sometimes it is easy to get lost in the smaller details and forget what the main purpose of your research is. Being able to boil your research down is a good way to show and share your understanding of the project at hand.

Over the past week in-between site seeing, looking at waveforms, and attempting at creating a basic map of my area on GMT I have been attending different talks here at the CAS campus. They have had a couple english speaking professors here to talk about what they do. I love going to the talks because I find that I have a very general knowledge of geophysics and geology, with these talks I gain insight into different specialties and specifics while still remaining general enough for me to understand it and ask questions. I am happy to say that this week I have learned more about Mars (like the fact that Mars can have volcanos but no evidence of tectonics), subduction zones (specifically in the Caribbean and Mediterranean) and repeating earthquakes as well as earthquake prediction. I love being able to learn more and expand my knowledge of geophysics. Most of these professors have drawn me into their topics very well proving that they would be capable of giving excellent elevator talks. If a speaker knows their topic and explains it well enough I am better able to understand and learn from them.

As for getting along in a foreign country; so far everyone has been wonderful and very accommodating of Clara and I not being able to speak the language. The language barrier can be a hindrance but if everyone is patient we can usually work out an understanding. Sometimes though we revert to needing hand signals to properly understand what people are trying to say. We are trying our best to learn the differences in culture to not be accidentally rude. I have found that sometimes people think things are common sense and forget to warn us about certain things until someone catches us doing it wrong. We had an incident like that when we did not realize the hot water tap was not a sink and that we had accidentally flooded the room.

We have so far gone to visit the forbidden city (which was closed so we walked around the inside of the wall and took pictures) and the Ming Tombs. Both had beautiful architecture and a lot of history. The subway ride to get to the forbidden city was extremely easy to understand so it was slightly confusing when the forbidden city was a little less clear. We found ourselves confused on where to go and even how to leave since there was a lot less direction. I think we would have probably had an easier time if we had gotten a tour, or even if we had decided to visit on a day the museum was actually open. It was a little sad to be around all that history and not be able to understand the full story of it. Besides that, we are having a lot of fun exploring the city at our own pace, and we managed to learn a lot about the Ming dynasty during our tour of the Tombs and anti-corruption museum.